Championship Manager 2008 - exclusive preview

Faster, deeper and now with added roughing up

Championship Manager has had a tumultuous time over the last few years. Since Sports Interactive took the original game engine to Sega and called it Football Manager, Championship Manager has been rebuilt from the ground up. It wasn't perfect from the off (far from it, in fact), but the series has been steadily progressing and now could finally be in a position to challenge the management trophy holder in the title race - especially if what we've seen is anything to go by.

Championship Manager's trump card is the inclusion of ProZone - the game analysis tool used by real managers to examine a game and track players' performance in extraordinary detail. It's back again after its debut last year and, from what we've seen, it's looking like being a football fan's dream. You can set a time period from a bar representing the full 90 minutes, choose players by means of checkboxes, and then ask the game to call up all the examples of anything they did during the match.

Above: The ProZone screen in all its detailed glory. You could lose weeks of your life here and not care

By doing so, you may realise that your right-winger has been passing back inside too early, or even tending to pass backwards. Another big inclusion for this year is the perfect remedy for such behaviour - individual player training in key areas with the ability to even train a player to switch positional roles over the course of a couple of months in the game.